Reading Musical Meaning in French Literature from Diderot to Proust

This book examines what it might mean to listen well to music and the ways in which that question is intimately tied to another no less complex one, that of what music means, or could mean, in the modern period, in relation to French literary texts of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.Music’s meaning in this period is entirely caught up in questions of how music relates to the language that writers use in order to articulate how, and what, music might mean. This study takes as its focus European art music of what is referred to as the common practice period and its immediate aftermath, the period often termed the “long nineteenth century,” and it examines these central questions primarily through literary texts that reflect but also, crucially, shape the experience of musical listening by giving form to the language available to listeners seeking to articulate the experience of listening. This experience is always a process of making meaning, and Acquisto argues that as understanding of music shifts from eighteenth-century rhetorical models to the notion of absolute music in the nineteenth, music takes on a sort of agency as it shapes its listeners just as much as they push the boundaries of what and how music might come to mean.